CORVETTE CELEBRATES IT'S 60 BIRTHDAY WITH A STUNNING NEW MAKE-OVER

Chevrolet Corvette is 60 years old this week, The iconic American sports car miraculously survived a troubled birth, quality problems, recessions. Now, the 2014 makeover debuts at Detroit auto show.

The Chevrolet Corvette is 60 years old this week, and that's a miracle. Many miracles, in fact.

The iconic American sports car has survived a troubled birth, quality problems and development delays. it has overcome threats from recessions and regulations. And it has outlasted waffling by Chevy parent General Motors over whether such a car should exist at all.
It appears, through all that, to have become younger than ever.
After a few VIP sneak peeks in the past weeks, Chevy unveiled the 2014 Corvette Sunday night​ at a reception here for an estimated 2,000 reporters, editors, Corvette buffs and auto insiders. In a melee almost extinct from modern auto unveilings, the car was greeted with fierce applause and shouts of approval and, once executives were done talking, a rush to get near the car onstage.
The new car is a radical, high-tech overhaul of an already exotic machine, and makes its offical debut Monday at the first media-preview day for the Detroit's North American International Auto Show.
The redesigned sports car is the seventh-generation Corvette, the so-called C7, and Chevy is reviving, for the base model, the Stingray name first used on a 1959 race car, then on the radically redone 1963 Corvette.

More than an exotic indulgence by an automaker rescued from ruin by U.S. taxpayers, Corvette is an international symbol of GM's status as a top-tier automaker — the kind of credibility that GM needs as it continues to rebound from its 2009 bankruptcy reorganization.
"A company like General Motors has to have a car like that. A world-class manufacturer has to have a sports car," says Bill Warner, a businessman who founded The Amelia Island Concours d' Elegance classic car show in Florida in 1996. Warner also is a veteran racer, auto journalist and car hobbyist, who got a peek at the C7 before the unveiling.
The old and new Corvettes by the numbers:

2014 C7 base model/2013 C6 base model
Length 177 in./174.6 in.
Width 73.9 in./72.6 in.
Height 48.6 in./49 in.
Wheelbase 106.7 in./105.7 in.
Horsepower 450*/430
Torque 450* lb.-ft./424 lb.-ft
Manual transmission: 7-speed/6-speed
Automatic transmission: 6-speed/6-speed
*Chevrolet estimates